Park Ji-young

Cast Park Ji-young and you are casting authority. The character names on this page make the argument by themselves: Queen Yoo, the King's Mother, a head court lady, a company representative, a director, and a long procession of mothers. She is a South Korean actress who works constantly across film and television, and what directors keep buying is her ability to play the person in the room who already knows how the situation ends.

In historical drama she is royalty and its enforcement. She is Queen Yoo in Scarlet Heart: Ryeo, the King's Mother in The Concubine, and Head Court Lady Jo in The Red Sleeve, the woman who runs the palace's internal rules. These are not decorative parts. Korean palace drama runs on protocol, and she plays the people who administer it, usually flat-voiced and with no visible effort.

The contemporary work is the more varied half. She is Hae-ra's mother in The Housemaid, Na Mi-suk in Love Next Door, Ahn Hee-yeon in Little Women, Kang Eun-Sil in the thriller Save Me, a real estate manager in the small-scale Microhabitat, Kim In-sook in The Roundup. The through-line is that she almost never plays the person a story happens to. She plays the person the story has to get past.